London Startup Makes Culture Fit Measurable

ThriveMap® 05 December 2016 12:00

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

By Chris Platts
Monday December 5, 2016

London based tech startup measures culture fit between teams and individuals. After running successful beta programs with HSBC, AOL, Belron International and TeeSpring, ThriveMap® product is gaining momentum in the marketplace for hiring and team fit evaluation.

ThriveMap® is a software application that predicts culture fit between individuals and teams. It enables companies to make better, data-driven decisions, and minimise the risk of “cultural mismatch” whether for internal team creation or hiring for culture fit.

ThriveMap® is the first tool that measures how likely new hires are to succeed based on practical insights about how a team works.

The Problems Businesses Face:

The cost of a failed hire can be up to 60% of an employee’s salary

Only 1 in 10 of these failed hires will be down to technical competence, leaving the other 9 to be down to fit with the team.

An unconscious bias is a snap decision, one which happens before you’re even aware a decision has been made. The amygdala is to blame: two almond-shaped neurons which control both fear (that person is not like me) and pleasure (that person is like me, and part of my tribe). In other words, unconscious bias is a product of our lizard brain.

Some companies use psychometric testing including personality, integrity, and conscientiousness tests to predict job performance. The science behind these is widely debunked.

“Meet the team” style unstructured interviews to assess culture or team fit often confuse sociability with compatibility

ThriveMap’s Solution: Finding a way to measure culture fit

ThriveMap® maps out a team’s ideal work environment, and compares it to how people like to work. Rather than basing the survey in psychometric theory, ThriveMap’s questions are derived by months of research into organisational theory and team dynamics, and speaking to managers and HR Leaders in large companies.

“Over 12 months, we spoke with over 350 HR Leaders and Team Managers to find out what was really important to them when managing and hiring for teams.” says Chris Platts, CEO. “We’ve based our survey on real situations that teams face daily rather than theoretical studies”

This is done via a survey before the interview stage. The survey measures how teams and people like to work based on 5 categories that relate to decisions, actions, evaluation, progression and relationships.

Unlike personality tests, ThriveMap® does not place people into fixed categories such as “introvert” or “feeler”. Instead, it shows where candidates sit on these 5 scales, based on how they like to work.

“It’s important you can see exactly how teams and individuals like to work on a scale and decide how to interpret the data yourself rather than create an arbitrary cut-off point and labelling someone as a ‘type’” says Platts.

By comparing candidates with the team group, ThriveMap® is able to provide visual, numeric and textual feedback on culture fit, as well as the specific areas where a candidate’s fit is strongest and weakest. ThriveMap’s predictive engine is based on on data from thousands of completed surveys and hundreds of conversations with managers and HR leaders.

Companies that use ThriveMap® to make hiring decisions are statistically less likely to act on implicit biases, ensuring that companies will be more likely to hire more diverse candidates.

About ThriveMap®
The founders, Chris Platts and Mark Hla, see ThriveMap® as a natural progression from their original venture and employee branding platform TalentRocket. Extensive research, combined with personal experience of over a decade in recruitment and statistical verification, lead to the beta launch earlier this year. Since then, ThriveMap® has taken on the advice of multi-national corporations to build and develop the product.

What others have to say about ThriveMap®:

“ThriveMap helps us to hire for team fit based on real insight rather than a gut feeling.”
Jo Steel, HR & People Manager at Belron® International

“I strongly believe that for a team to be successful, they need to understand each person individually, ThriveMap helps back this with data.”
Ami Parker, Senior People Operations Manager at Teespring

Comments from Chris Platts, CEO and Co-Founder:

“Rather than trusting existing theory we started from a position of understanding what data managers need to make better decisions. We were able to see that the best teams are full of different personalities, what they are not full of is people who prefer to work in completely different ways.”

“Companies who are using ThriveMap for recruiting already have found that the insights have enabled them to better predict team fit and avoid making costly mis-hires.”

“ThriveMap started in TalentRocket as a tool to help candidates find their perfect work environment. When we were showing companies what TalentRocket could do for their talent acquisition, they’d see the ThriveMap data on the different types of cultures candidates wanted to work in and started to ask loads of questions. We knew we were onto something big.”